In the beginning...

No one sets out to be a dog walker. You will not find us at Career Days. It's usually something you do while waiting to do something else. 2008 is my 15th year of walking, the job I've done longer than any other, so this is my "something else."

Oddly enough, people sometimes tell me that they want to be a dog walker when they retire. Really? I so do not want to walk dogs when I retire. By the way, no one ever approaches me in February, in the freezing rain, and says, "boy, I wish had your job!". That only happens the first nice week in the spring or fall.

Before I walked dogs, I had an office job, with air-conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. I could wear nice clothes and not worry how dog spit would look with that shirt. I wore high heels. I carried an umbrella. I also wished that I could be outside on nice days, hated corporate life, and fantasized about a job I would actually enjoy doing. Fortunately, I have the best husband in the world, and he encouraged me to find that job.

My sister was walking dogs for a service in NYC, and I commented to her that what I really wanted was her job. By coincidence, the company was hiring, and the next thing I knew I was freezing my ass off in the winter of '94, getting shin splints and passing out as soon as I got home.

Like a lot of dog owners, I was under the delusion that if I had a relationship with the dog I was walking that it would behave. I thought that making the dog like me would make everything OK. Love is not the answer. Sorry. Some of the dogs I walked were well-behaved on the leash, but most of them had no problem imitating sled dogs at the start of the Iditarod. The training books I read were no help, since they were a)geared for suburbia, b)assumed that the dog was a puppy and c)that you had more than 45 minutes a day with the dog.

By the time I left the service and went off on my own, I knew that I needed a better system for managing my dogs. The only way to make any money walking dogs is volume - this is my job, not a hobby, and the point is to make money. A lot of dog walking services advertise that they provide individual service, and personal attention - "no risky pack walks". They can do this because they have lots of walkers, most of whom, by the way, can only walk one or two well-behaved dogs at a time without falling apart. Walkers like this come and go, moving on when they get a "real" job or a steady gig as a musician.



This blog is the story of how I learned to walk a pack of 8 or 9 dogs and make it look easy, and also a chronicle of my frustration with the idiotic things I see people doing with their dogs.